The Great Escape (16 page)

Hannah looks at him blankly as he delves into a coolbox at his feet, her eyes widening as he produces a bottle of champagne. ‘What’s that for?’ she exclaims.

Felix shrugs. ‘Well, I’m going to drink it, of course. And I’d be very much obliged if you girls would help me.’

‘Are you sure?’ Hannah asks, frowning.

‘Of course! I wouldn’t be so greedy as to polish it off all by myself …’

‘Well, if you insist,’ Sadie adds, at which Felix waves down the lady with the snacks trolley as if she were a passing cab.

‘Three glasses please,’ he says grandly.

‘We only do plastic cups.’ She eyes him with suspicion.

‘That’ll do. Just a receptacle of some kind, thank you.’

With a barely perceptible pursing of the lips, the woman hands Felix the cups, which he accepts with gushing thanks and a wide smile. As she moves on with the trolley, and he pours out the champagne, Hannah catches Sadie’s eye and smiles. She knows Sadie remembers this: drinking champagne from plastic cups on that last night together at Garnet Street. It whooshed to her head then, as it does now, making her feel giddy. As for Felix, this stranger in a particularly unappealing pink top – there’s something about him, she thinks. When they’d first boarded the train, all she’d wanted was Sadie all to herself. But now, with the champagne flowing and the knots of tension disappearing from her shoulders and neck, Hannah isn’t remotely taken aback when he looks at her and Sadie in turn and says, ‘So, girls, tell me all about yourselves.’

By the time the train pulls into York station, an entire bottle of champagne has been drunk, a second has appeared and Hannah and Sadie have learnt that Felix, who owns cocktail bars in London and Manchester, is making the trip north to check up on his latest venture in Glasgow. He wants to know all about Hannah’s paintings, and scrolls through every single image of her work on her phone, saying he’s a dumbass about art but these are lovely. He listens to Sadie’s tales of child-rearing with rapt interest, brushing aside her fears that she’s being a baby bore. As Hannah describes the ice-spitting fridge, and Ryan’s ex-wife, the three of them decide that Petra probably takes her cello to bed, kissing its little tuning pegs and caressing its woody curves.

As the train slows down before coming to a halt, Felix appears to be as excited as they are. ‘There’s Lou!’ Hannah cries, leaping up from her seat.

Spotting them, and quickly kissing Spike’s cheek, Lou charges towards the door, lugging a navy-blue bag emblazoned with gigantic poppies. She scrambles on to the train, makes for their table and hugs them both tightly. ‘All set?’ Lou asks, turning to wave Spike goodbye. Spike manages a closed-mouthed smile.

‘Yes,’ Hannah laughs, indicating her cup. ‘And we’ve started already, thanks to Felix here …’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ Lou grins, offering him her hand.

‘Look at Spike,’ Hannah marvels. ‘I haven’t seen him for what – three years? And he hasn’t aged a bit …’ On the platform, Spike thrusts his hands into his pockets.

‘That’s the life of leisure for you,’ Lou chuckles. ‘It’s like being preserved in aspic.’

‘He’s still cute, though,’ Sadie teases her.

‘Sadie’s saying you’re still cute!’ Lou mouths through the window, causing Spike to frown uncomprehendingly.

Thank God they’re here
, Hannah thinks as Felix requests another cup from the trolley lady as she passes. The train lurches forward, and the three women turn to give Spike a final wave, but he’s no longer looking in their direction. He’s turned away, as if in a sulk, and is rooting about for something in the pockets of his slightly too-young-looking leather jacket.

TWENTY-ONE

As Lou’s train pulls away, Spike takes his mobile from his pocket and grips it tightly as if it were a life-support device. He pauses before making the call. Who was that man sitting next to Hannah – some posh oik, by the look of him – who’d leapt up and lifted Lou’s case up onto the luggage rack? There was champagne too, by the looks of it. Spike saw Lou smile her thanks, then start talking to him, all animated, while he stood there like a spare school dinner.

Lou looked pretty today, Spike reflects, with her striking auburn hair bouncing around her impish little face. She’d put on slim-fitting jeans and a soft green sweater he’d never seen before. But it wasn’t her clothes, he realises now as he makes his way towards the station exit. It was her body language that seemed different. Despite Spike’s plans for the rest of the day, he feels a sharp stab of annoyance. Why was she so pleased to be getting away from him? And why couldn’t she be more like this at home – pink-cheeked and buoyant and looking glad to be alive, instead of scowling in that marshmallow dressing gown and forcing him to do his CV? If a jury of his peers were presented with the cold, hard facts about his affair with Astrid, would anyone really blame him?

‘Sod it,’ he mutters, leaving the station and dialling Astrid’s number. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from York station to her house. Rather cruelly, the quickest route takes him past Sound Shack where, as if to maximise his pain, Rick has placed Spike’s guitar on a stand in the middle of the window. Spike pauses, taking in the blonde wood curves, and the fretboard worn by his very own fingers. A price tag dangles from one of the tuning pegs: £425.
£425?
Is he taking the piss? Quickly, Spike turns and marches onwards, fury bubbling like lava in his veins. He’s always considered Rick a friend, and has known him virtually all the seven years he’s lived here. He’s obviously not a real friend, though, ripping him off like that. Spike has experienced that a lot over the years – people who want to be his mate, just because of who he is. At least what he has with Astrid is real, he thinks, trying her home phone for the third time, then her mobile (where the hell is she? Isn’t she busily preparing for his arrival, having a bath, delipidating or whatever it’s called when women shave their legs, and smoothing lotion all over her body?). Her airbrushed bum pops into his mind and he feels a shiver of desire.
She
doesn’t care about ‘My Beauty’, or any horse telly songs for that matter – she’s far too young to remember Follyfoot. Nearing her street now, he tries her mobile again. Still nothing.
She’s teasing me
, he decides, his heart filling with hope as he turns the corner and her house comes into view. Spike raps sharply on her front door. Nothing. He tries again, then steps back onto the pavement and scans the windows. No one there.

Deciding to adjourn to the olde worlde pub in the next street, he nurses a couple of watery pints before nipping outside and calling her again. Miraculously, she picks up.

‘Hey, you,’ she says, her voice tinged with amusement. ‘You’ve called me, like, five times! Is everything okay?’

‘Er, yeah!’ He pauses and frowns. ‘I just … well, I’ve just seen Lou off and thought, if you’re not doing anything … you do
remember
, don’t you, that I’m a free man this weekend? Like, all weekend, because Lou’s gone to Glasgow?’

‘Yeah, ’course I do. I just got in actually.’

‘Where have you been?’ he bleats, starting to walk towards her house at a determined pace.

‘The library.’

‘The
library
?’ Fantastic. He’s sold his guitar so the two of them could have heaps of uninterrupted time together, and she’s been at the library?

‘Yeah, the library, Spike. You know – that building with lots of books in it. Why shouldn’t I go to the library?’

‘Oh, no reason.’

‘You sound out of breath. Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m just walking.’

‘Sounds more like a brisk canter, Spike. God, maybe you should stop smoking …’

‘Yeah, anyway,’ he cuts in, ‘did you get some good books?’ Then, realising how peevish that sounds, he adds, ‘Because I don’t think you’ll be doing much reading this weekend.’

‘Oh. Haha. No, well … I suppose reading can wait. So what time d’you think you’ll be over?’

‘Er …’ He pauses, blinking at her freshly painted front door. ‘Well, I’m sort of here now.’

‘What, here? At my house?’

‘Er, yeah,’ he mutters.

She sighs then, a proper, exasperated sigh. ‘Shall we finish this phone conversation and talk face to face?’

‘That’d be good,’ Spike says with a feeble laugh. Astrid is still clutching her mobile as she opens the door.

‘Hi,’ she says lightly.

‘Hi, babe.’ He steps in, kissing her cheek.

‘So I’m assuming Lou got off okay,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’ He looks at her, and the anticipation that’s been building up all week ebbs away like water into sand. Something about Astrid’s mouth set in a tight line tells Spike that the weekend isn’t going to pan out as he’d planned, and for a fleeting moment he pictures Lou, with that round-faced little tosser on the train, laughing and guzzling champagne.

TWENTY-TWO

By the time Sadie’s train reaches Newcastle, Barney is exhausted as he places his writhing children into their buggy in the living room. It’s 3.30 pm – milk time if he were to stick to the rigid routine which seems to dominate their lives these days, although right now his sons seem keener on exercising their tiny lungs than feeding. How can babies make so much noise? It seems completely out of proportion to their size – high-pitched, urgent, desperate. He’s tried to feed them, but they lurched away from the bottles as if he was offering them Jeyes Fluid. So what
do
they want? Why can’t they communicate more clearly, and say, ‘Sorry, Dad, but I’m not really in the mood for a bottle right now. What I’d really like is a walk in the park – to be out of this dingy little house?’

Anyway, what would happen if Barney ignored the routine and went off piste, treating them to, say, a bag of chips at 4 pm? Would he be arrested? Would Little Hissingham be consumed by floods, resulting in mass deaths? ‘It says here that it’s really important to establish a routine,’ Sadie explained several months ago, waving one of those thick, glossy baby manuals at him, written by a smug woman emitting of-a-certain-age glamour, who’d clearly never wiped poo off a baby’s lower back in her entire life. So many of Sadie’s sentences start with ‘it says here’.
It says here that home-made baby food is better nutritionally. It says here that we used to have fun …

Sex too, if Barney remembers rightly. They used to have that pretty regularly. That one time, a few weeks ago now, was the first in living memory and, frankly, only served to remind him of what he had been missing. Before that, he’d almost forgotten that it was something adults did. Then that night happened – so tender and lovely it had brought tears to his eyes – making Barney foolishly think that intimacy might be back on the agenda. He now realises it was a flukey one-off, and probably only came about because Sadie was delighted to be getting the hell out of Little Hissingham for two days. Since then, whenever he’s tried to touch her in bed, she’s gone rigid with tension as if he might be about to pelt her with ice cubes.

Perhaps it’s moving here, to this bleak little dot on the map, which has pushed them apart. To Barney’s prickling shame, it was his idea in the first place. As he manoeuvres the buggy outside, he remembers wanting to protect his pregnant wife and children from the noise and pollution and people shouting outside their Stoke Newington flat. And Little Hissingham was affordable – just – and within commuting distance of London and surrounded by fields. Fields he’s since discovered aren’t much use as there’s no way of knowing which ones might contain a bull.

‘Aw, lovely boys you’ve got there.’ A middle-aged lady pauses to admire his sons as Barney reaches the park gates.

‘Thanks,’ Barney says as she falls into step with him.

‘Aren’t you a good dad, bringing them out? Your wife’s a very lucky lady.’

‘Er, I don’t think so,’ he blusters, ‘I just do it, you know …’

As she turns off the path, Barney watches her growing smaller, feeling guilty now for thinking bad thoughts about routines and baby books. Sadie isn’t lucky, he wants to yell after the woman;
he
is, for having the good fortune to have met such a clever, remarkable, sexy woman. They’re going through a blip, that’s all; isn’t that how those child-rearing experts put it?
It’s common for new parents to feel estranged from each other.
A little distant and cold, and lacking the intimacy of their pre-parenthood life …

It’s drizzling now, settling on Barney’s face like wet breath, but at least the boys seem less fraught. Glancing up at the sky, which has turned a moody, gunmetal grey, Barney decides to make a pit stop at the park café. That’ll fill half an hour. Then, in another fifty-seven hours and thirty-two minutes, Sadie will be home and everything will be normal again.

‘Hi, what can I get for you?’ asks the perky young girl at the counter. She has a slight accent – Polish, perhaps – and a short, impish haircut. Her fringe is secured to one side with a butterfly clasp.

‘Er …’ Barney scans the menu on the chalkboard on the wall behind her.

There’s no beer on offer, unfortunately, but the thought of coffee, and possibly something sweet and baked, is preferable to the nappy fug of home. ‘An Americano please,’ Barney says, ‘and one of those little currant things.’

‘Sure.’ She flashes him a white-toothed smile. ‘Cute babies,’ she says handing him his coffee and pastry.

‘Thanks,’ he smiles proudly.

‘They obviously enjoy being out with their dad.’ He glances down to see both boys gazing up at the girl in wonder, transfixed her by her smiling, open face. Perhaps that’s what they’ve been missing today: Sadie’s feminine presence. Can he blame them for regarding a bearded male with dastardly bottles of formula as a poor substitute? He’s frozen Sadie’s precious breast milk in case of an emergency, a sort of ‘keeping the best till last’ approach.

‘Yeah,’ he says, grinning. ‘I hope so anyway. They weren’t happy a minute ago, though.’

‘Look like you, don’t they?’ Barney meets the girl’s unwavering gaze, wondering with mild alarm if she’s flirting with him. No, surely not. He’s thirty-six, a clapped-out dad in knackered jeans and a faded Kings of Leon T-shirt, and he hasn’t even combed his hair today. ‘Think so?’ he asks.